Brats on AllMovie

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy play both the fathers and their unruly children in this two-reel comedy. The really funny thing about this film is that as the kids, Laurel and Hardy don't behave much differently as they generally do as adults. The relationship is basically the same between the two youngsters, and little Ollie usually suffers the most damage. The father/son effect was created by making two sets exactly the same, with one set being more than twice normal size, to make the kid Laurel and Hardy appear child-sized. The two sets are seamlessly combined in several scenes, so we can see, for example, the fathers playing checkers while their sons are a few feet away, playing with alphabet blocks. There's not much plot -- the kids misbehave and are sent to bed early, but before they crawl into bed, they create more havoc -- and an overflowing bathtub that Ollie doesn't discover until it has flooded the whole bathroom. Because not every theater was yet wired for sound, a silent version of Brats was made, which still exists today, in addition to a colorized version released in the late 1990s.